Review: Hark

Hark by Sam Lipsyte
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Before I started reading this one, I thought of Sam Lipsyte as possibly the funniest novelist writing today. (And that’s in a universe that includes Gary Shteyngart).

After reading it, I feel the same way, even though I think this one is a bit of a disappointment.

Page for page, this is hysterical. Lipsyte has a capacity for deadpan observation, for making the everyday miseries of life turn into humor, that never fails.

Here are a couple gems: At one point, our protagonist Fraz, who’s married to a woman most people recognize as out of his league, meditates on his place in her advice. As Lipsyte puts it, “His wife told him that life was not a zero-sum game, but he suspected he was the zero-sum if it was.”

In another, reflecting on some latter-day hippies, he observes they were on “the right side of history but the wrong side of glamour.”

The heart of Lipsyte’s description deals with Hark, himself, a guru who proposes a self-help program built around the concept of “mental archery.” The concept is at the perfect intersection of plausible and goofy, and Lipsyte runs on with it brilliantly. Even knowing it for a joke, I imagined taking focus from it, and then I laughed all the harder at the cleverness of the construct.

The trouble here, though, is that for all the humor and for all the brilliance of the situation – the hapless Fraz becomes an early Hark acolyte and leader in the cult of personality growing around him – there’s a limited central story. Hark is who he is, a finished product. And Fraz is a Schlub, but he’s a schlub who’s landed in enough clover to make his sad-sack experiences less interesting that in the even funnier and stronger The Ask, Lipsyte’s last novel.

I enjoyed the first half of this immensely, watching all the descriptions unfold. Then, as the second half took place, I found too much of the plot contrived. [SPOILER] Does Fraz’s daughter really need to fall into a coma? Does his wife really need to sleep around with his sleazy one-time best friend?

And then, while I continued to enjoy the language and inventiveness of the narrative, I found the end especially flat. [DOUBLE SPOILER] Lipsyte kills off Hark (in what I acknowledge, again, is a funny scene involving an actual arrow) because he seems to run out of things to do with him. And then, in the closing pages, he has Hark appear to various characters of the novel as a Christ-figure, as someone greeting the soon-to-be-dead to a kind of heaven. I get that it’s ironic, and I get that it comes as a kind of critique of the almost ubiquitous Christ-trope (as in Harry Potter, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and many other places) – and I love the quick note that Fraz, as a Jew, is barred from heaven because “there are rules, of course” – but it seems an ultimate failure of imagination to travel so worn a path.

So, I simultaneously recommend this one and urge caution. And I leave it with the renewed sense that Sam Lipsyte is probably the number one writer I’d want the chance to sit down and have dinner with.


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